Brightkite as a social networking service excites me and I was thrilled when they came out with an application for the iPhone. The iPhone app offers all the flexibility and functionality found when accessing Brightkite via the web with the added benefit of using the location ability of the phone to more easily mark your position.   Users have the ability to checkin at a known location, allow yourself to be located and then checked in, or search for a nearby location (based on the iPhone locating you) to check in.  You can also check in an leave a note or check in and post a photo.  Once checked into a location one of your options is to choose the "nearby" button and you will be presented with a list of other people that have checked in to that location or a nearby location.  From there you can explore the locations where they checked in, make new friends, or leave comments for those that follow to find. The only thing that I have found that you cannot access from the app is some of the fine grained settings, but they rarely are accessed save when setting up your account.   I highly recommend this app and Brightkite too.  If ...

Google has unveiled its new public beta - Base.  Although described as an online database where users can store anything, the functionality it presents to a new user is very comparable to the offerings of Craigslist. From Google's description "Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which we'll make searchable on Google (if your content isn't online yet, we'll put it there). You can describe any item you post withattributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches. In fact, based on your items' relevance, users may find them in their results for searches on Google Product Search and even our main Google web search." To me it seems a way for people to post specific items on Google and get those items specifically featured in Google's searches.  I've only started playing around with Google Base so expect an update in the near future.

I was messing around on iTunes, during a rather long phone call and absentmindedly clicked on the Sync button.  To my surprise everything worked just fine.  The call did not drop, the sync completed successfully.  iTunes did not perform a backup of the phone during this session, so that may or may not impact performance.   I'm going to play around more and see what other things can go well during a sync. Hmm VNC works

Graffitio   is a digital graffiti app for the iPhone.  It is location based so performs better with the 3G version of the phone that has the integrated GPS system. Although billed as a graffiti app it is much more the digital equivalent of urban tagging.   Your name and a short message are posted on a geographically specific digital wall.   Walls can be of various sizes, but users can only create localized ones.  Walls the size of cities, states, and countries are a Graffitio staff only creation.    Creating a wall is fairly simple.  Once Graffitio has loaded and found nearby walls you press the + icon presently located in the lower right portion of the screen.  A map is loaded showing your present location.  If you wish to create a wall elsewhere, simply drag the map till the cross hairs are positioned above the desired locale.   The last step is to add a name then click on create. A nice simple app that allows for brief self expression.  I've seen all sorts of usernames out and about, but have yet to find Kilroy.  I would like to see the feature of designating size (or range) of the wall.  A digital version of geocaching could result with small enough ...

While updating my iPhone today I came across a limit of 144 icons that can be displayed on your home screens.  During the restore process I had iTunes add all of my app purchases to my phone.  The result was nine full pages, each having sixteen icons on each.. with another twenty icons not displaying.  Made for a bit of confusion as I was looking for several of the apps that were not on the screen. Has anyone else run across this limit?  How did you handle it?  I've been playing around with the Categories (jailbroken) iPhone app which condenses apps into groups. More on Categories later. Aside from not having enough screen real estate the iPhone is working much better since the reinstall.

Banner free is a nice little application that turns your iPhone into a portable sign board. It allows the owner to set a customizable message that will scroll right to left when holding the iPhone in landscape mode.   Features I'd like to have: change the colour of the scrolling text and the background, the speed and direction  of text scrolling, and some cool blink effects as well (bring back the <blink>) I've had it on my phone for several months but have not found it a needed application.. still I keep hoping that the occasion will arise so the app stays on my phone.  

Wow!!!! this is the app I felt the iPhone had been missing.  First off this app works on jailbroken phones at the moment.  Qik has submitted their app to the Apple store and is awaiting approval, until then.... jailbroken iPhone is your only option to stream live video from your iPhone.   During the last two months I've shot 59 Qik's  some of these have been test posts but one of my favorites was the space shuttle launch from 150 miles away.  That'll give you an idea of a Qik at the most extreme of the iPhones technical capability, smaller fast moving object at night.    as for the technical aspects: Qik captures video in resolutions of 320x240 or 176x144 You have the choice of geo-tagging your Qiks: precisely, street level, city level, or never  Lastly you can add a title, description,  and tags before you shoot. Chat is available during a live shoot, but it is a feature I've yet to explore. Qik's can be marked public or private and access during a live shoot or arcived viewing is determined by your choices on the website. http://qik.com   Qik is also integrated into other photo services passing your Qik to your accounts on: Youtube.com 12seconds.tv mogulus.com mobuzz.tv seesmic.com tumblr.com Notifications are also sent to Twitter and your Blogger account. So during ...

Today I took my 25th mugshot ( http://www.dailymugshot.com/main/show/4673 ) with DailyMugshot.   It is a cute little app whose purpose is capturing a sequence of daily head shots and then displaying them in a rapid mugshow view or mosaic overview.   Overall I love the app, the only drawback is lack of an alarm to remind me that I've not taken my picture today, still even without that feature I'm capturing myself 75% of the time.

I started using this iPhone app at the beginning of November 2008 to track how much I've been riding, so far I've documented 180 miles. iMapMyRide is the iPhone application from MapMyRide that uses the GPS capability of the 3G model to  track and create a map of your latest ride.  During the ride you get instantaneous and average speed and pace. The app itself allows for basic sorting of previous rides and map view of the routes taken.  My only complaints so far is that on occasion it takes longer than I would like to acquire my position and be ready to record and the lack of granularity when it comes to using the Twitter notification feature, its an on or off thing and at the moment continues to send out duplicate posts when rides are complete. [caption id="attachment_6" align="alignright" width="265" caption="http://www.MapMyRide.com"][/caption] You can find my ride profile at:  http://www.mapmyride.com/user/551194383726/  See you out and about! :-)